Saturday, November 9, 2013

A Washington D.C. startup aims to re-route food that would be thrown out by grocers to hunger relief groups.

NPR reports that Roger Gordon, co-founder of Food Cowboy, is building relationships with food retailers all over the country to prevent the hundreds of pounds of produce they legally cannot sell because it has gone soft or is lightly bruised from being wasted.

“We want to set ourselves up as air traffic control for food,” Gordon told NPR.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, roughly 40% of food in the U.S. goes uneaten, mostly because distributors don’t have the time to find a home for the perishable food most stores will not accept.

Gordon’s brother, Richard, is a trucker who used to haul loads of food rejected by retailers to dumpsters or landfills. If the load was small enough, the distributor would allow Richard to take the food home and give it to a local charity but if not, to the trash it would go.

This influenced the brothers to scout out food charities along Richard’s route.

“The trucker is under time pressure. … But oftentimes the charity is just a few miles away from where the shipment has been rejected,” he says. “It’s just that the truckers don’t know about it.”

To strengthen these connections, Food Cowboy has created a website where food companies, truckers and charities can find each other. According to NPR, the company makes money by taking small commissions from each transaction. For just 10 cents-a-pound, a food bank can buy enough from Food Cowboy to fill up their storage space.

The challenges, Gordon told NPR, are food retailers not wanting to be blamed for someone getting sick and the hours of food charities compared to a trucker’s 24/7 schedule.

“Dumpsters are always open. And there are more Dumpsters than food banks,” Gordon says.

Since it first emerged three months ago, Gordon estimates that Food Cowboy has diverted roughly 300,000 pounds of food from landfills or dumpsters to food charities in Texas, Nebraska, Florida, New York, Connecticut and Georgia.

He says that the next step is to put more emphasis on social media.

Fighting the same fight is CropMobster, which uses an online message board similar to that of Craigslist where food producers, grocers and charities can post ads in one of five sections: free, deal (meaning deeply discounted), wanted, donations or trade.

Co-founder Nick Papadopoulos told The Salt he got the idea for the company while working on his family’s farm in Petaluma, California, where he would regularly till excess food into the ground.

Since starting the company six months ago, Nick estimates that his group has saved 100,000 pounds of food and in turn generated $50,000 in new cash for the small businesses that have sold their products on the site.

NPR reports that earlier this month, a rancher posted an ad for 35% off whole chickens when he ran out of room to store them in his freezer. Then there’s a woman who put out an ad for her ten apple trees, which were picked clean in 12 hours.

Although the company is definitely growing, Cropmobster hasn’t been able to generate enough income for the majority of its staff to quit their day jobs. This is why Nick is looking to greatly expand his business by recruiting angel investors and venture capitalists in the coming months.